Lenny DellaRocca (Poetry) | Delray Beach, FL

Chapbooks

Chapbooks

• Things I See in the Fire (Yellow Jacket Press, 2018). Poetry.
• The Sleep Talker (Night Ballet Press, 2015). Poetry.

Blurbs, Press & Reviews

“Lenny DellaRocca gives us fabulously fabulist prose poems in The Sleep Talker, a chapbook of dreamy utterances, miniature philosophies, and shape-shifting epiphanies. DellaRocca is a poet of great intelligence, wit and skill. He does what every poet (and driver on wet roads) should do–he steers int the skid”
—Denise Duhamel

In these beautifully nuanced, artfully crafted poems, Lenny DellaRocca takes us into worlds where magic and dream sing to us like almost forgotten memories, in language as clear as the very air we breathe. This is soulful, heartfelt, wonderfully strange poetry that teems with luminous images and satisfies with the magic of its narrative drive. Though reminiscent of folk-tales and magical-realist fables, DellaRocca’s poems are his own original and fresh creations. His is a mature voice and a welcome addition to the choir of contemporary American poetry.
—Michael Hettich

Lenny DellaRocca’s new collection of poems, Blood and Gypsies, is really two distinct books. “Blood,” with its connotations of family and violence, is full of stories of three generations of an Italian–American family. The other book, “Gypsies,” is made up of mostly short, enigmatic, cryptic poems — “vignettes” (that word is in the title of seven of the poems in this section). But both sections (or books) are imbued with a kind of melancholy nostalgia for something that never was or cannot be understood. The poems in both sections have a powerful, imagistic quality — like things you can see but cannot explain. Thus, the two complement each other, just as that very title, Blood and Gypsies, already conjures something magical, something familiar but strange at the same time.
—Charles Rammelkamp

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